Pa. among US leaders in bridges with red flags

ASSOCIATED PRESS

September 16, 2013 12:01 AM

ASSOCIATED PRESS

September 16, 2013 12:01 AM

HARRISBURG -- Pennsylvania is among the nation's leaders in bridges that both lack backup protection against collapse in case a single, vital component fails and are designated by highway officials as being in need of repair, an Associated Press review of national bridge records found.

Some are among the busiest in the state, including the 85-year-old Liberty Bridge spanning the Monongahela River from downtown Pittsburgh to its south side, and an Interstate 95 span in Philadelphia's lower northeast section along the Delaware River.

Others are on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Fewer than a third are state-owned, with many owned by county and municipal governments or railroads.

An Associated Press analysis of 607,380 bridges throughout the United States in the most recent federal National Bridge Inventory showed that 65,605 were classified as structurally deficient and 20,808 as fracture critical.

Of those, 7,795 were both -- a combination of red flags that experts said indicate significant disrepair and similar risk of collapse.

A bridge is deemed fracture critical when it doesn't have redundant protections and is at risk of collapse if a single, vital component fails. A bridge is structurally deficient when it is in need of rehabilitation or replacement because at least one major component of the span has advanced deterioration or other problems that lead inspectors to deem its condition poor or worse.

Pennsylvania has 577 bridges that are both, according to a state Department of Transportation list, although one, the Walt Whitman Bridge connecting South Philadelphia to New Jersey, was fixed over the past year and is no longer considered in need of repair.

The list has shrunk from the 646 that Pennsylvania reported to the federal government in 2011, a decrease PennDOT officials said has to do with extra money set aside in recent years to fix its most troublesome bridges.

But that extra money is gone and, if nothing changes, the total of bridges that are considered both fracture critical and structurally deficient is unlikely to drop substantially, PennDOT officials said.

If anything, the state is staring at a projected annual increase of 100 structurally deficient bridges as the deterioration of the state's aging bridges accelerates past the amount of money available to fix or replace them.

"We were getting to over 1,000 bridges a year for three years straight," said Scott Christie, PennDOT's deputy secretary for highway administration. But now, "we can barely afford to do 200 bridges a year going forward, so that number (of structurally deficient bridges) is going to start increasing."

Christie said that any bridge in Pennsylvania that is deemed unsafe by an inspector is closed.

Fracture critical and structurally deficient bridges warrant more frequent inspections, but a bridge that qualifies for both categories does not necessarily make it unsafe, he said.